Smart Driving Cars episode 403

It's the Smart Driving Cars podcast. You have found us again. We appreciate you spending

time with us. I'm Fred Fishkin along with the Faculty Chair of Autonomous Vehicle Engineering

at Princeton University. Alan Kornhauser, hi Alan. Hey, good afternoon friend. We hope

everyone had a great Thanksgiving and is gearing up for the holiday season. Alan, you spent

some time in Florence, Italy and via Zoom you've returned with our guests today from the University

of Florence, Professor and Researcher Adriano Alessandrini. Elizabeth and Helen and I had a

wonderful trip to Florence thanks to Adriano and we had a wonderful session discussing what he's

doing and it was wonderful to spend Thanksgiving in Florence. Very nice.

I mean, it's always a pleasure to have the occasion to talk to you about project ideas and

especially about deployments because there's a lot of talk about things that might be done but

actually a little bit less about things that are actually being done and this is something we have

in common. We like to do things, not just talk about them and yes, I mean Florence is always

a very great place to be especially because of its medieval and Renaissance art and everything but

also because of our demonstrations. Well, you have a mobility solution there that you've worked on.

T-U-S-S? Give us the overview what this is all about. Basically, the idea is to combine

car sharing with carpooling or ride sharing so it means that especially for the last mile

going toward and from train or tramway stations most people travel together so if they book in

advance a ride they can find a vehicle that can carry several people at the same time.

One of the passengers is chosen as a driver and they drive together to their destinations. Then

before leaving the vehicle, if there is another person, another passenger going backwards,

this passenger is collected and then there is an exchange of driving responsibility

and so the vehicle never stops. It goes back to the train station and it continues to go all

round and round and in case the vehicle is left parked somewhere because there is nobody to

reposition the vehicle, there is an operator that can reach the vehicle with an electric

bike or with some other foldable light mobility system to take the vehicle and repositioning

where it is needed. Would it work better with automation? Yes, of course, repositioning empty

vehicles with full automation would be a plus but it's actually not necessary. So having

unnecessary expensive technology at present is less important than having a working principle

which is let's share vehicles because this is the only way to actually fight congestion and to have

a smart and efficient mobility for last mile and not only. And of course the important piece of

that is the affordability that comes from out-of-ride sharing which should not be forgotten.

The affordability in terms of the cost of good sold associated with putting the service out there.

Yes, it's nice to be affordable if you have some, as I say to my students, if you have some sugar daddy

out there giving you the money to do whatever you want but unfortunately that's somewhat of

false hopes associated with that. The way to do this is to make it affordable at the cost of

delivery side not necessarily at the price side and I think Adriana what's nice about what you're

doing is you're really focused on that aspect so that in fact you can be out there and you can do

it sustainably and spend your time operating the system as opposed to going around begging for money.

Our rides are quite cheap because the full ride costs less than a dollar per ride so this is

something very inexpensive if you consider that a public transport ticket in Florence

costs one euro seventy so nearly two dollars so we give in our ride to half the price of a public

transport ticket and then the the other very important thing that Alan said is that we actually

manage to be self-sufficient we don't need public subsidies to operate so we work of course together

with a number of private players like for example companies that need to bring their

manpower at work in the morning or the university that needs to move students etc but most of all

we don't ask for public money to subvention to to help us just doing the operation as it is the case

for any public transport service. And that's at least one of the many things that I really appreciate

about what you're doing and what we spent a long time discussing and having the past is the opportunity

to do this without public subsidy because if one looks at the publicly subsidized systems around

guess what they're they end up being short term demonstrations and then all of a sudden it might

be a report on a shelf and that's the best thing that you got out of it as opposed to having a

sustainable solution to providing mobility to people who really need a ride. How many vehicles

do you have now Adriano and what are the plans that you have for growing this idea? Well at

present we made several successful demonstrations as University of Florence then the University of

Florence thought this was mature enough and successful enough to create a spin-off company

so basically we have started operations providing mobility for students and staff at the university

but as a private company as an offspring of the university. Then we were about to enlarge our

operation to a broader part of the metropolitan city of Florence outside the municipality of Florence

with different vehicles. I mean we started with these vehicles that you can see in the picture

on my back but I mean these are electric, inexpensive, very slow vehicles which are very

effective for short rides inside the city. They are much less effective if you have to go on

motorway stretches so we are doing this with other vehicles including corporations with very

large companies in the metropolitan area who needs to carry every morning their employees

at work and back in the afternoon and we mix this with the use by the residents and this is actually

promising to be expanded to the entire metropolitan city of Florence before the end of next year.

So if that would be the case we are talking about a fleet of at least 10,000 vehicles so

not a minor thing we're talking about doing this stuff for real. Now of course we're starting

small we have at present 11 vehicles operating we are about to add another 10 but the point is

that the growth will become exponential as soon as there will be other places in which we can

expand our services. But Adriano I wouldn't use it as an excuse that you're starting small.

Has anybody ever started big? I mean not even Apple not not even Fuelapacker not even IBM

not even I don't know not even NVIDIA NVIDIA didn't start big.

No but I mean for example if you take the foray of Waymo into the automation world

they started with the idea of going full automated since the beginning and they invested millions

and millions of euros to make wonderful products but to me the point is do you really need automation

when you have a person who is capable of driving on board where you actually need automation is

when you have nobody capable of driving or when you have to reposition empty vehicles.

In that case I agree automation is essential but as long as you have people who are able to drive

let them drive. I mean in the European and Italian legal framework this is also

a protection because the problem is that we don't have the same freedom that you have in

in United States of that exists in China. The main problem for us is that you need to have

a person who needs to be hold criminally responsible. If it's not the driver then it's the CEO of the

company. So if a company comes to Italy and puts 10,000 vehicles on the street automated vehicles

on the street these 10,000 vehicles make I don't know 10,000 kilometers per year each so this means

that you will get easily 10 million vehicles and 10 million vehicles will sooner or later

vehicle kilometers will sooner or later kill a person and this means that the CEO will go to J.

And whoops we don't want that okay I mean we're not going to jail Adriano.

Yeah I yes that's understood in some sense one needs to be have protection on that

my goodness how did the airplane in the airline industry ever get started I'm sure they never

killed anybody on the way from Kitty Hawk to Newark Airport my goodness and so

hey they're risk associated with mobility they're risk associated with anything anybody does

and yes and man the value of the mobility has to be such that it overwhelms the risk

and that's why we go that's why that's why I visited you in Florence because the value to me

of coming to you was absolutely worth any risk that I was going to incur in getting there and

but there were some risks that's just fine fine with me I was happy to I was happy to take it Adriano

the problem the problem Alan is always the numbers okay if I individually travel on my cars

the risk of killing a pedestrian is extremely small because actually drivers do drive well

okay so there is a very very small risk but when you put all together all the vehicles

circulating in a nation for a year well in Italy we end up killing about 300 pedestrians a year

this means killing one a day and yeah yeah this is something that happens and and the problem is

that automation though wonderfully made cannot solve them all while you still keep drivers on

board and you just reduce the automated part to nothing or to the one which are absolutely

necessary that you can do low speed then you resolve all the problems even the liability

problem the insurance problem everything so then that's why we decided to go forward this way well

I I I I really like that you have gone forward that that way and of course I absolutely agree

with you the only reason that you need automation is for the empty vehicle repositioning problem

to address that one if we had symmetric demand then it the problem would be easy I mean

transportation would be easy if the demand was constant throughout the day and that the demand

was symmetric if it's symmetric that jeez I mean we would have been in in happy land Nirvana for a

very long time it would it would be easy what makes it challenging is is the is the peaks in the demand

which that's where you need to have the ride-sharing otherwise you have to have vehicles to meet the

peak okay and then during the during the valleys they're sitting around all right how do you then

reduce the number in the peak you share in the peak if I use the elevator analogy all the time

heck if you weren't willing to share elevators in a tall building there wouldn't be tall buildings

because you would need elevators throughout the first floor to have enough of them to take

everybody by themselves but in the morning when people come to work and if they crush in

in the evening when they're going out of work they crush going down during the day hey you get to

go ride the elevator by yourself okay that's that's just a fact of life and and in a sense you know

and the writing public knows that people are in in public transit know that know that in the morning

you know in in one direction there's all kinds of you can't get a seat on the other direction you

launch out and have a have a snooze yeah so much room right I was going to say our viewers and

listeners also know from from hearing you reading your book there's also the the economic aspect of

this having to pay a driver which I don't think Adriano you don't have to deal with that right

the way you're set up we don't need a driver because one of the passengers also is chosen to be a

driver when we register our customers if they decide to register as drivers they have some

advantages for example when they reserve if they reserve in time and if they are drivers they have

guaranteed the service so it's not like you call a taxi and the taxi is not there okay you have the

service guaranteed it's our problem to find a way to to bring you a vehicle when you need it but I

mean you will be guaranteed that there is a vehicle there if you are registered as a driver on the

contrary if you're registered as a passenger then you only have the service in case there is at least

another passenger going in the same direction at the same time that is registered as a driver so I

mean these are the but the other thing I wanted to say to compliment what Alan was saying we basically

designed our service to be mostly a last mile service and to be able to serve the man which is

not evenly balanced but which has at least one passenger every eight that goes in the opposite

direction in fact we use eight passenger vehicles and in the big time we put eight passengers in

one direction but we still have the one passenger that can carry the vehicle back and actually our

initial results which come from serving overall we have served less than 10 000 trips so far but

I mean the our average occupancy for the vehicles is 3.4 passenger per vehicle actually 3.4 it's

quite a big number it is a very big number it is a very big number go ahead go probably I mean

people who are not too familiar with this they don't have the the magnet but normally our vehicles

circulate with one 1.2 passenger per vehicle okay and they get stuck all the the rest of the day so

having 3.4 it means that we actually substituting three vehicles for every ride that we make and we

make several rides during the time during the day so this means that we are being pretty effective

and we have not solved but I mean we have helped solving the problem of repositioning empty vehicles

by making small detours to to get the driver of the next ride on board before the end of the

previous ride and this actually helps never stopping the vehicle okay so we accept a minor

deviation from the direct ride but we're still able to keep the vehicle moving which is what we

actually do need to get the the the real figures to to never needing repositioning vehicles of

course never doesn't exist at off peak time it happens that we need to reposition vehicles

but that's the reason why we need an operator by the way the operator is the same guy that also

cleaned the vehicles and recharge them and do a number of stuff for which in any case you do

need an operator even for an automated vehicle okay so in in our case the fact that our vehicles

are not automated don't change anything in terms of quality of service or in terms of the the

the flexibility of the service and we are able to do it with much cheaper vehicles we are able to do

it much better of course you need to have some place to serve that concentrate the man so in

our cases it's the lectures for the students stop and ends all at the same time so it's easy there

is a timing that already concentrate demand or it's a train station the train station actually

has the train that arrives at a given hour and therefore you have many passengers getting out

or in the same train so they can share vehicles and this is what actually helps us to bring our

average occupancy rate to that level well that's that's what I really appreciate about your approach

it's it's not that you're going to have to serve anybody and everybody and so on you've

here at the beginning of all this focused on where you can do it and focus on where the demand

is such that you can operate this service and why not operate the service in the places where you

can places where you can't where the demand doesn't match up where it is and concentrated well you

know leave that to somebody else again this is the beginning of all this and at the beginning

this is what you do and essentially nobody serves everybody there's never a solution for

everybody the idea of this is to find the places where it is a solution concentrate on that and

be a happy camper going into the future right to me it's it's it's the beautiful way to approach

this and to me it's exceedingly elegant in terms of the the way you're doing it with the focus with

the right focus the focus that have to be a high quality for that market would be affordable

because of the way you're doing it and of course as you point out just because one might be

driverless and doing the same thing you still need people it's not that nobody's going to work for

the entity it's not that the labor cost is actually going to go all the way to zero there's still

some people but the productivity of that labor just gets multiplied and i'd like to go go back and

discuss your 3.4 3.5 average vehicle occupancy number at how huge that is one of my pet peeves

these days or for a while they've been is it all of a sudden even what driverless and talking about

driverless is oh my goodness there are vehicles going around there that don't have anybody in it oh

how inefficient it is uh well if you look at i think if you actually look and do the count

of cars as they operate in florans or in princeton or in in albuquerque new mexico or in anywhere

in the country i guess including new york i don't think that the average vehicle occupancy

in new jersey right now at 12 52 p.m on the 2nd of december is greater than one i think it's

less than zero i'm not less than zero less than one not less than zero excuse me that was a real

mess because some people took somebody someplace and now they're taking the car back home or back

to someplace in other words they're just empty vehicle repositioning that car to someplace else

earlier today in princeton when people were taking their children to school because it was raining

i mean you know because who wants to take the school bus i mean talk about that never mind i

want to say that and i take them to school and then they come back home average vehicle occupancy

for those whose trips is 0.5 0.5 1 0 the persons at computers is the whateverism is is not not

getting any useful mobility function they might be providing the transportation because you didn't

have to park the vehicle over here and you could park it over here and you didn't have to pay for

parking here where you don't have to pay for parking here so maybe you know that's value

proposition but and if you take that over what exists and the few people that are really two

people in a car going from a to b and really want to go from a to b at time t and three people it

almost never happens unless of course i'm dragging elizabeth and helen with me but they don't count

because they're baggy i mean i'm whoops i didn't say that either but i made the decision on the

travel they're coming for my be behest not their own behest and so therefore the average vehicle

occupancy when i'm dragging them along is one one not three so we've got to be careful how we count

this okay because all of a sudden if we have a mobility solution that allows us to not have to

empty reposition the car to park it or not have to do that then these are the numbers we're going

and so oh my goodness just because you see you know some vehicles with nobody in it or in

adriano's case the poor guy who had to take a scooter out there to go get the vehicle and empty

reposition it you know you'll see a guy in there you might count it as one well you count it but

really that should be a zero okay because he's just doing the empty vehicle he's not he's not getting

the value proposition to him or her or the mobility mobility is supposed to give you time

acquire for you time place utility because you want to be someplace else at a certain time

because you'll be a happier camper that's the only reason people travel the only reason i went to

warrants is i knew i was going to be a happier camper you know being with adriano then you know

being stuck here in princeton we had a nice state and that's a fact of life in the stake

house in florans and this is a worthwhile the trip but beside this i was actually i have a

comment about this fact of having too few people on the vehicle today something amusing happened

that if you are registered as a driver so if you put your license on when you make the reservation

you automatically go to the driver checkbox okay but then some of the guys using our service

just unclick it unwisely okay so 11 people today reserved to at the same time but only one

checked the box to be a driver okay so basically the system said okay i can take eight because i

have a driver so the driver plus seven but i need to refuse the other three so the other three guys

actually decided to join the party and to hang themselves outside the vehicle so i had to stop

them and explain to the driver that this is an unlawful behavior and that i would have to report

them to the police and have his license removed but i mean it was quite funny to see these small

people with two people hanging outside are these are these the way your students behave

are these your students behaving in this way oh well my students don't behave that well i don't

know actually probably worse you know i have i have mostly italian students probably that's in our

dna i don't know but i mean we are inventing we find solutions so if there is an eight place

vehicle already full with people you just hang outside why not i think you know at the morgan

town prt system at west virginia i think every year all the students go in there and see how

students they can stuff into a vehicle you know whatever i mean students i guess i guess we must

bore them in our lecture and they're they're lectures and they're looking for some excitement

outside or something like that the ride-sharing numbers are really amazing from what i understand

yeah waymo which has had a very good year is not doing that at all at least not yet really

you know yeah they're they're doing something else if you don't do ride-sharing the main problem

is that i mean it's like providing a taxi service with i mean empty vehicle repositioning so

this is not really beneficial for the city so i mean we can really move a lot of people

because we charge a very small amount we can charge this very small amount thanks to ride-sharing

if we didn't put a lot of people in the same vehicle we were we wouldn't be able to actually have

to charge that small amount plus that the other point is if you have many people in the same

vehicle you have one vehicle instead of several others moving and this means that you're actually

being beneficial in terms of traffic in terms of nitrogen emissions in terms of safety in terms of

many things so this is for me a very sustainable solution something that should be encouraged

and what i really want to point out is that this is financially self-sustainable

well that's that's amazing congratulations yeah well it's it's it's the same approach

we're trying in Trenton and Mercer county and our opportunities to ride-share are not as great

but ride-sharing is really important and where we're finding where the opportunities for ride-sharing

really exist are again are taking kids to and from school and you might say well gee don't

they have a school bus well it turns out in Trenton they don't unless you i don't know live

more than two and a half miles away from the school and and and and so there there's some real

opportunities but again because of those opportunities it's really valuable plus

we're not trying to load up a whole who knows what 40 foot school bus of kids we're trying to do

really 234 is is what we're targeting as as as appropriate if it turns out that it's greater

and we can take them in greater groups because certainly in the in the affordable housing areas

kids go to school they're not close to the schools so taking the kids to and from school is really

an important component of the whole darn thing and and of course we think that that the in the

societal value associated with getting a kid to school as opposed to staying home is just enormous

so that's what motivates us well we'll be reporting more on on the progress with with the

handy rides venture going forward yeah so Adriano and I Adriano I must you know compliment you you've

you've been the whole time that I've known you doing as opposed to talking and and I really

compliment you for for doing that because it's quite different trying to do than to just talk

about it me I'm just finally putting my toe and actually doing something as opposed to sitting around

pontificating until the until the cows come home whatever but it is it is it is really

satisfying to me to at least be trying to do it and and of course complimenting the others are

trying to trying to do it I compliment Waymo for out there trying to do it and you know they have

their own while they have more money than God they have other people that they have to answer to and

so on so it's not necessarily easy for them just because they have the money although it'd be nice

we had some money but hey who needs money man when you actually actually the opportunity

to do it affordably is just sitting there for us to do and and and and so it really doesn't take

much money actually of course we as any other startup need money to start because you need

you need money for making a better app you need money for many things but the important thing

is that our business model is not even capital intensive this is what we discussed last time

I mean when you start a sharing service you normally have to buy or rent several vehicles

instead we operate vehicles which are provided by companies that have a mobility problem so

we are using these vehicles that are vehicles provided by the university we are using other

vehicles which are provided by a company that needs to actually provide a service to their

employees we need we use other vehicles so this actually makes our fleet capable of growing

much much more easily because we don't need to invest ourselves for every single vehicle we

put into operation we put we will put of course vehicles ourselves but the point is we don't

have to immobilize capital in buying or in providing guarantees to loan vehicles okay so

this is probably the best innovation not only we do it affordably not only we do it

in a financially self-sufficient way we're not even very much capital intensive so we can really

scale up soon and fast and this is something that I think it's unprecedented in this world

because we have to take into account that doing shared transport in the outskirts of a city is

probably the most complex things ever made public transport doesn't doesn't ride effectively there

sharing doesn't work very well there and we have proven we can so this is something that is

potentially revolutionary and of course if then automation will become cheaper cheaper than

actually having the guy on the bike reaching the vehicle we will of course feature some automation

but very very small amount of automation which is the bare minimum to actually improve our

productivity not something to just show how nice it is to go around in an automated and

actually I mean I am the guy that in Europe put the automated shuttles in 2012 on the street so

I mean this is not something I'm not capable or not interested or not fond of doing just I don't

believe that automation needs to be done for itself automation really needs to be employed

where it is needed which is of course repositioning empty vehicles or driving people which have some

kind of limitations you know it's I applaud you 13 years ago you were doing this in city mobile

and you know and and I think that's where I first met you and and really appreciated that

and and we are we've decided to go down the the driverless modes simply because I happen you

know in my own personal belief think that we may be able to have access in some places

in just some places where driverless vehicles that are affordable that can do the empty vehicle

repositioning but here I'm looking at for the places that we can do it where there exists

sufficient demand where it can deliver really some quality community values and

community value and that's what we're looking at here and it's a very similar plight of what

you're looking for as a demand as a place to do this to get the whole thing started

then once we're started then it will be much easier to go up the the the growth curve the

deployment curve the on that and and to try to do it without without the overhead of the public

subsidy because you know as I I don't know what it's like in Italy but my conclusion of of public

subsidy and and transportation in the US is for every dollar you get it costs you two

that's it's not a very good thing to be okay and and and you said we have some freedom

where we want some freedom because of course if you do it for them then you don't have any freedom

and who knows what overlay and so on supposed

protection that you need to provide it's not that we're loose cannons on ships here but

my goodness we think that there are opportunities out there a little niche opportunities to get

started getting started as it's always small so you only need a niche and then the question is

is how do you scale a niche but let's at least start and create the niches but but you know the

in the case of Florence is for me is very emblematic because often nearly one million inhabitants

of the metropolitan city of Florence only 300 000 live in in the municipality of Florence in the part

which is densely inhabited and with very effective public transport the other six the other 600 000

almost have no choice then to drive and they must drive their car to some place where they

need to park the car and then ride the public transport service because we don't allow them

to drive into the city center the city center is too beautiful to to narrow to unique to everything

to actually have a million car driving there okay so the point is that we have filled the

metropolitan city of parking lots to park the car and then to ride the train or or a tramway to the

city center and this is actually it means that there is a difference in quality of life so there

are plenty of places where you can actually do this last mile service and getting each time

a few thousands of people but if you get few thousands of people here and few thousands of

people there you can easily get to 300 400 000 customers and i mean our goal is to serve

55 regular customers with one vehicle this means that if you if we have to serve

550 000 customers it means that we need 10 000 beings

yeah we're sort of in the same rule of thumb associated with that 55 50 40 you'd really like

to be there because that's the productivity of the vehicle and so on so that in the end the

cost of the vehicle per ride is really really ends up being small you can only reach that

if you do ride sharing and sort of in some sense the advantage we have here in the United States is

our million population cities guess what their public transit system oh they don't have any

whoops or yipes because the only good one is basically a new york metropolitan area new jersey

transit whatever i mean we serve half of the half of the public transit riders in the new

york metropolitan area in the whole country you know we serve as many in that area as the rest of

the country does and so you know the opportunities here the places the brownsville texas places where

some of this could really provide some some some good mobility to people who really need a ride and

and for people who already have sort of a good ride could have even a better ride uh is i think

just enormous yeah and in that case as distances are bigger and uh opportunity to have ride sharing

smaller then you must have automation to help you reposition vehicles otherwise you will not be

productive but in our cases we actually our main point is that we are actually uh complementary

to public transport we really want people to use main public transport and we are the last

and the first mile to serve a much wider portion of the land of the territory by enlarging the

opportunities out of public transport which after all is just a number of lines yeah and we're the

same way here in new jersey because we look at that new jersey transit rail operation on the

northeast corridor as being well essentially the best commuter rail operation in the nation

i don't know kinetic it might argue but but whatever and in our simulations and again there are

simulations that that this kind of accessibility last mile uh first mile that that that adreano

is described done in new jersey um you know we can increase the ridership in new jersey transit

rail by 50 percent you know because because you know people now don't use it because the parking

and whatever difficulties you gotta park at the station whatever and then when you get to the other

end you can't get to wherever you're going but now if you have these systems at at at both of the

the station boom ride boom you know and then get home one of the things we haven't that we discuss

when we were together how important the decision to take a mode on to someplace is not to get there

it's to make sure you can get home you know i mean really i'm so ungrateful put the put the

brake arms out there so that could get home from grandma's house okay i mean then this is this is

what is in people's minds when they decide oh damn it i'm just gonna drive i'm gonna pay for the

parking why because the car is gonna be there to get me home uh it got me there big deal basically

basically the counterflow demand is as important or even absolutely than the forward leg the

counterflow is i mean is what really makes park and ride not feasible yep because i mean if if you

take a train from Manhattan to new jersey then you don't have a car available at any parking lot

in new jersey then you have to find another way in fact when i come from Manhattan to Princeton

i normally prefer to take the bus which is very slow very inconvenient it makes an incredible

number of deduces but that's just one point which is very good it drops me just in front of the

okay and the darn train they moved it away from from the Nassau in and in 2010

i fought that another thing i lost i have i won anything i mean jeez how many things do i have

to lose i'm gonna win this one though hey adriana we're gonna win this one together absolutely

absolutely we we we want to win we will win this has been such a pleasure

alan you want to touch on a couple of other quick headlines sure sure yeah from the new

york times today there's a guest essay from a neurosurgeon jonathan slotkin who is chief

medical officer for strategy and growth at geisinger that's a pennsylvania based health

provider the headline of the essay reads don't fear self-driving cars they save lives

i tell us something we didn't know i mean hey they're they're they will only be permitted

on the roads if they do okay or at least they we they break even all right otherwise

absolutely no nobody's gonna approve them all right but at least i i guess as wemo i think

is demonstrating with their data as as tesla has put out that nobody wants to believe their data

but it put out i mean these things drive better than some of us me and i mean it's amazing uh

and and and whether or not they do today um the rate of change of this thing is such

you know you don't want to extrapolate because it could be doing this

uh is such that they're going to i mean if i stop at a stop sign at a t intersection

and have to turn left i have to look this way and i have to look that way and then i have to look

this way and then i have to i mean how many cognitive cycles does it take for me to figure

out whether or not i can do it these things are looking both ways simultaneously

30 times a second you know my cognitive cycles aren't 30 times a second

and how many cognitive cycles does it take for me to there's nobody come i'll go

and as i'm looking here the guy in front of me started to go and i didn't see that he stopped and

then i run in the back oh my goodness these things are looking 360 simultaneously now

unless you know we they wrote the code really poorly they should be able to determine

we don't even have a chance because we don't have the data rate we don't have the information rate

i can say that knowing you for some times you go much faster than 30 cognitive cycles per second

but beside beside the joke no it's clear that automation can save life the only problem is

that automation itself cannot do everything so there is an infrastructural part which is also

very important today Waymo and the others choose very carefully where to drive and where not to

drive while we as not very much prepared and sometimes not wise try to drive everywhere at

whatever speed we feel is right in that specific moment this is the cause of most of the accidents

so if automated driving will actually help us to improve our road infrastructures

this will be definitely a breakthrough in terms of road safety if not i'm afraid that we will

start a lot of litigations because of the people who were killed in accident caused

by automated driving vehicles and this i don't want to say it's the end of automated driving

but it will really create problems for the company and i mean i've been doing automated driving for

more than 25 years now so i i know what i'm talking about it's impossible to have the

automated vehicle that can go anywhere at any time no matter which is the difficulty of the

infrastructure it doesn't exist so we need to be very careful in saying that automation

is the solution to everything automation is a very important help to finding a good solution

which include also that we review some of the design of our road infrastructures well not to

one up yet adriano but i've been doing automation for more than 50 years

and although although some of it was in guideways okay but you're absolutely right

first of all nothing is for everything and to think that in fact we're going to develop

something that automated that the do drive can go everywhere it's like silly the whole discussion

the level system level five are you joking everywhere come on cut it out you know nothing

is everywhere um we do make bad decisions and that these these systems might not make i was

driving up the new jersey turnpike when sandy was approaching new jersey sandy was the hurricane

and i said that sucker is not turned on left i'm just gonna keep going

that sucker turned left and it almost cost me okay how stupid of me okay that was my decision

and in fact if one looks at the crashes out there you know they're largely people misbehaving

they're doing this they're doing this they got their phones out they're picking them up off the

floor they're sleeping they're whatever they think they're the owners of the infrastructure and can

run up anybody's and go as fast as they want you know i mean it is all this misbehavior

and of course it sort of suggests that these automated vehicles are going to be able to

avoid all the misbehaviors by others uh it's just like silly okay and and and so this whole

business about it's got to be perfect well if it really has to be perfect and i'm going to

quit doing this right now and go enjoy the rest of my life whatever the hell i have left because

you know perfection on this is just not achievable folks sorry we're all out here trying to do the

best we can to try to provide a little bit more value than we are going to institute in costs

so that people are happier campers and we have a better community out there and if that's not

good enough for you then you know get somebody else to do stuff i quit how's that anyway adriana

it is so great i think we had one more fred that you wanted to mention and i should comment on the

new york times i think it's great sure there are all sorts of values associated with this

and and you know the the but the mobility opportunity that it gives for people to

improve their lives who right now really need a ride and don't have a good way to do it and don't

have a an affordable way to do it we're mass transit works and is a high quality ride for

you keep doing it please that you know it's it's it's not going to get cheaper than that

problem is is that those things are so few and far between that few people get to get the opportunity

to do that what about the rest or some of the rest of them and that's what we're adriana and i

are trying to provide some value to right the to solve that story the doctor said a lot of people

see this as a tech story but he views it as a public health breakthrough yeah it's it's it's not a

tech story this is a value to people story and that's another value to people okay

the other headline we were going to mention was from the minnesota star tribune i think

self-driving cars have been in grand rapids since 2022 it says and i think they're talking about a

company we're familiar with yeah mobility and sure they've been there they do have vehicles

that are driverless but they do have an attendant on board that you know which i don't know if it's

even mentioned in the story and that's fine to have an attendant on board

they just have decided that the risk reward upon the attendant isn't there yet i guess that's made

mobility's call and i'm not even sure whether or not minnesota regulations allow you to do that

i mean you know we face the same challenge here in new jersey there are two things one

technology has to be good enough uh which we're i'm still not sure yet but getting closer and

then the other one is is that in fact um i won't have to go to jail at least go to jail for a long

time if i do it and so they're either either we test it in the courts or we get some regulations

that say hey yeah it's okay to do it take advantage of it look society this is a value proposition

here do it wouldn't cost the the legislature anything to do that uh just take away the constraints

excellent well adriano we want to thank you for spending time with us congratulate you on

thank you it's been a real pleasure and it always is with with the both of you so thank you very much

thank you and uh say hello to your students for me and uh we'll see you soon okay see you soon

well alan you've got to get back to grading exams for you oh no i don't want to do that i hate

great why can't we be like brown i wouldn't know i shouldn't you can find us at smart driving car

dot com and my tech reports are at textination dot com thank you for watching or listening and please

stay safe

Smart Driving Cars episode 403

self-driving cars

Waymo

About this episode

Original notes